I am going to buy a laptop soon and want it to be completely gentoo (linux) compatible. That means the media buttons, stand-by, wireless etc. should be supported by kernel directly or at least by closed source stable drivers, like the nvidia gpu's. Because: I want to support open driver development and I don't want to spend hours trying to figure out how to make the hardware work and google for solutions. Price is not that important.

I don't necessarily need a specific model. I am rather looking for a manufacturer or a laptop series that is known to be supported by linux. Also the overall quality should be good.

Some outline data:

~15inch display

regular sized keyboard

matte display

silent

battery for at least ~2h of typing

capable of playing 720p video*

*Is there any integrated graphic chip out there that is able to accelerate this? 1080p would be better of course. This is the only multimedia features I need. Gaming is unimportant.

Last edited by Sujao on Fri Feb 12, 2010 4:50 am; edited 1 time in total

IMO best hardware out there used to be Quanta. IBM used to re-brand them and sell as Thinkpads. Being the best lots of Linux developers had them, meaning Linux support was excellent. Don't know where Lenovo gets their hardware, but you can Google for Quanta, I think one can buy those directly.
Nowadays the choice of video hardware is wider than ever. See this:

This is in my wife's VIA PC. In conjunction with 1.5 GHz VIA C7 CPU it can play HD video! Using openchrome drivers. This VIA CPU has max power consumption of 20 W. Imagine a laptop based on this kind of low-power hardware. It could run on batteries forever. Cool and quiet, too.
I'm looking for similar laptop myself. To replace my aging Thinkpad, which still works, so I'm not rushing.

I suggest you consider Dell. Their laptops are designed with support for Ubuntu Linux. I filed a complaint about their lack of Gentoo Linux support at their IdeaStorm website and they said that all of their patches go upstream and reach other distributions after some period of time, so any laptop Dell sells should support Gentoo. I know that my Dell Inspiron E1705 runs Gentoo Linux marvelously.

Dell also has excellent hardware build quality, which is the only other thing they have going for them right now. As long as you wipe the hard drive clean and install Gentoo Linux, you should have an excellent experience with them.

By the way, I suggest getting a Dell laptop with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled, so if you ever need to contact them to have your laptop repaired, you will be sent to technical support people that deal with Linux, which should make dealing with them less of a nightmare.

I got mine preinstalled with Suse Linux, and everything works. I think if you get one preinstalled with Windows, but with all-Intel hardware, everything will work (though, 3D performance is pretty weak; many people swear by their nVidia GPUs -- YMMV).

I have had some issues playing 720p, but I think that's more related to codec than raw processing power. Matroska usually weirds out, MPEG TS is fine, YouTube videos in HD work fine.

I have also heard that Dell has narrowed the quality gap at the same price point, and preinstalling with Ubuntu may confer other benefits -- worth a look. However, for the high-priced road-warrior machines, Lenovo and Apple are still the standard IMHO.

got a dell, fully supported, check my site for specs.
using the os driver for ati from git, no problems there, plays 720 without a problem and some 1080p using ffmpeg-mt_________________Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former - Albert Einstein
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I suggest you consider Dell. Their laptops are designed with support for Ubuntu Linux.

Man...you should be kidding me. I got a pathetic Dell with an ATI you know...ATI...that's bad man bad.

Almost everything is incompatible with Linux! Apart from that lots of hardware problems.

Mine has a Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS and I do not have any problems. I regret that you purchased a laptop from Dell with an ATI graphics card. I suggest you post a complaint about it on IdeaStorm asking them to offer Nvidia graphics cards on all of their laptops to avoid this problem. I will vote for it.

I'm using IBM and recently Lenovo. IBM was a dream, flawlessly working wlan back in 2001 under linux. Never had any linux related issues with them.

Support is just great. They replaced twice a motherboard within 24h and once as I said them over the support phone the cd drive bay is broken, I had a new one the next day in my mailbox. I then could send the broken one back.

A friend of mine used to have a dell few years back, which had it's problems to and went into service. As he didn't live in the same place during the week, he was then without a laptop for more than 3 months because UPS didn't managed to deliver it. Even if not everything would have went wrong it would have taken about 5-6 weeks. Which is unacceptable in my eyes.

everyone ive come across has recommended a thinkpad
I do not own one, cannot comment. Only two things come to mind in terms of what to avoid

-steer clear of broadcom chips on your wired/wireless. Atheros is the best supported far as I can tell, but iwlwifi seems to be way up there as well
-avoid older Intel GPU's. My GM45 performs fine, but I do nothing that's all that resource intensive_________________Lost configuring your system?
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Thinkpads usually work well under Linux. However, compared
to the good old IBM Thinkpads, the Lenovo ones, unfortunately, have
suffered somewhat in terms of build quality (at least the ones
I have owned/played with). E.g., my W700 came with one
of those new and improved keyboards that have terrible
flex and are unusable for any serious coding. I had to buy a
good old (!) Thinkpad keyboard from an online retailer to replace
the flexy one since Lenovo refused to replace it.

I have heard good things about the laptops from System76
which look very interesting also in terms of pricing. System76's
laptops obviously are 100% Linux compatible.

The X and T series are still pretty great machines under Lenovo. Some changes from the IBM days:

1. The cases feel more flimsy, but resist actual damage better and are significantly lighter. This is because instead of having a full titanium shell, only the LCD has a titanium backing. The rest of the case is plastic shell with a titanium subframe. In a fall there's less energy to dissipate, and the case does a better job of it.

2. Still among the most expensive machines on the market, but in real dollars much cheaper than before.

I have heard good things about the laptops from System76
which look very interesting also in terms of pricing. System76's
laptops obviously are 100% Linux compatible.

DUDE!!!!

I'd never even heard of these, but the options for getting what I want are wicked (pardon the airheaded hippie lingo)

Next big chunk of money I get I may guinea pig one. By then I'd wager BTRFS will be more or less stable too. Probably a bit frivolous since the only thing wrong with my current laptop is the "C" key is mostly broken - an item easily replaced for $5 US - but hey, it's no i7 with 8GB and an SSD._________________Lost configuring your system?
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I got a PackardBell EasyNote TJ62 and I'm very happy with it. Everything works OK, including the volume up/down and screen bright up/down special keys.

I even changed from fglrx to radeon/radeonhd drivers and I get 3D acceleration with them. You only have to install the current portage ~amd64 versions of xorg-server, mesa and gentoo-sources. No need for strange overlays or ebuilds.

I bought it for €499 last August. It is cheap and powerful. I could provide you with all the relevant configuration files.

I have an Acer Timeline 4810tz with intel915 VGA.
This is not the most Linux friendly and the touchpad is disturbing for a while (you can switch off) but the pieces with the latest BIOS can be managed well using some settings. HW is recognized, wifi is intel1000 (supports injection with the later kernels out of the box), 1000 eth nic, and really long battery life. (up to 8 hours is advertised but I can not go above ~6.30h)
Light and slim piece with good power to work.

(A pal working on maintenance told me that Lenovos make him the job. He recommended Toshiba.)_________________Quis custodiet ipsos, custodes?

I purchase my laptops from a company called Linux Certified, which essentially sells Intel OEM laptops with Linux preinstalled. I'm on my second one from these guys, and I've been quite happy with their prices and service. These days the majority of hardware configurations out there will be compatible with Linux, but I refuse to let MS profit on my purchase.

Based on the specs, it looks like it's a solid computer, but I was hoping for some feedback before pursuing it farther._________________He who laughs last, laughs hardest
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